cointelpro

[Dan Scanlan <dscanlan@xxxxxxx>]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

November 25, 2003

Ashcroft's COINTELPRO Neutralizing Dissent in America
By DAVID LINDORFF

Disclosure of a confidential memorandum sent by the FBI to local
police disclosing a massive program of infiltration and surveillance
of lawful anti-war and anti-WTO protest movements confirms what most
progressives and leftists in the U.S. knew already--that the Bush
Administration and the Ashcroft "Justice" Department have ushered in
a full-fledged return to the Nixon-era practice of employing
police-state tactics against opposition movements.

The disclosure also led to a remarkably light-weight and historically
shallow and inaccurate report on those Nixon years by the New York
Times.

The Times, in an article on Sunday by Eric Licktblau, quite
appropriately draws a parallel between the current surveillance
efforts of the FBI and the abuses of the national security
establishment during the 1960s and '70s, but it minimizes the abuses
of that earlier era, and further implies that the abuses ended in
1971.

In fact, Cointelpro, a campaign designed, in the FBI's own words, to
"neutralize" and "disrupt" such target organizations as the Communist
Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panther Party, etc.,
and the individuals within them, began officially in 1956, and never
really ended. Indeed, the FBI's campaign of surveillance, disruption,
character assassination and outright murder were expanded well beyond
the agency's own actions to include local police "red squads," the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and the National Security
Agency, as well as other government agencies.

The Times article describes Cointelpro as a program designed "to
harass and discredit Hoover's political enemies." This hardly does
justice to the scope and scale of the program.

Hoover did, reportedly, attempt to monitor and undermine his personal
enemies, who included a number of politicians in Washington, and he
seemed to have a personal vendetta going against Martin Luther King
and some other civil rights leaders. But Cointelpro was much more
than a device to deal with Hoover's personal foes. It was a broad
campaign against organizations that threatened the interests of the
state, of presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and it
bred countless other extra-legal operations, including Nixon's
notorious legion of White House Plumbers.

The scale of the Cointelpro campaign and its less publicized
offspring of later years (most of Cointelpro's nefarious activities,
exposed during Senate hearings in the early '70s, were made legal by
executive orders issued by President Reagan in 1981 during his first
year in office), was mind-boggling. I discovered, for example, when I
obtained my own FBI file, that in 1969, when I was still 19, I was
the subject of an FBI Cointelpro investigation that made use of an
agency informant in my school administration at Wesleyan University,
simply because of my membership in SDS and the Resistance, an
organization that was providing information about resistance to the
draft. I also discovered that the Justice Department in Washington
was directing the US Attorneys Office in Hartford, CT to have me
arrested and jailed for public burning of my draft card in 1969. And
I wasn't a leader of anything--just a footsoldier in the antiwar
movement.

The sorry and frightening truth is that Cointelpro was a massive, and
probably hugely successful, campaign by the state to use secret
police tactics to destroy a popular movement and its leaders, and to
intimidate the public from exercising their constitutionally
protected right to protest and organize in opposition to the
government and its policies. Furthermore, while as a program with a
name, Cointelpro ended in 1971, that campaign of disruption and
surveillance has continued uninterrupted through to the present.

It is, for example, well known and documented that the FBI, during
the Reagan years, was infiltrating and disrupting CISPES, one of the
main organizations opposing U.S. intervention in Central America.
Similarly, local police red squads, such as the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, with
close ties to the FBI, was massively infiltrating and spying on as
many as 200 organizations, ranging from the Peace & Freedom Party to
the National Organization for Women and the Los Angeles Democratic
Party as late as 1979, with much of the information collected being
turned over to the FBI or a national data base operated by a shady
firm with national security links called Western Goals, Inc. That
LAPD spy unit wasn't disbanded in the '80s; it just changed its name,
and many other local police red squads continued to operate at least
into the 1990s. Indeed there is reason to believe that the FBI,
barred for many years from infiltrating legal opposition
organizations in the domestic U.S., deliberately made use of local
police departments to gather information on such organizations.

While the Times report on the FBI's latest domestic spying activities
against anti-war and anti-globalization activists is reasonably good,
the self-described newspaper of record does a disservice to history
and to it s readers by minimizing the nature and reach of Cointelpro
and its successor programs.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into
the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. A collection of Lindorff's
stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html

-------------

Afterword by Nick Wilson:

This article could well have cited the Judi Bari bombing and frame-up
case. After a six-week trial in 2002, a federal jury awarded $4.4
million in damages against FBI agents and Oakland Police officers for
falsely accusing Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney
of knowingly transporting the bomb that exploded under Judi's car
seat in 1990, nearly killing her. Most significantly, fully 80% of
the damages were for deliberate violation of the pair's First
Amendment rights to organize politically in defense of the forests.
The FBI and OPD had conducted a carefully sustained media smear
campaign against Bari, Cherney and Earth First!, trying and
convicting them in the media for seven weeks after the bombing, until
eventually the district attorney declined to file any formal charges
against them because there was no evidence whatsoever connecting them
to the bombing except as the targets.

The case reeked of the FBI's COINTELPRO tactics aimed at
"neutralizing" effective political opposition to the corporate-ruled
status quo. It was so effective that even now, over 13 years later
and despite the landmark legal victory last year, there are still
people who believe a pair of Earth First! activists were blown up by
their own bomb. Neither the FBI nor the OPD has done anything to
dispel the myth. Their defense to the lawsuit was to try to persuade
the jury that a reasonable law enforcement officer could have
believed, based on the evidence, that Bari and Cherney were carrying
the bomb. The jury didn't buy it at all, finding unanimously for Bari
and Cherney.

For more about the Bari case see www.judibari.org